Maya was supposed to be drying dishes. Instead she was holding the phone while her grandmother talked to Cousin Liesel, who lived where it was already night.
"Tell her about the bridge," Grandmother said in the old language, then to Maya, "go on, you ask. Your accent is better than your manners."
So Maya asked. And Liesel laughed and said a word Maya had never heard. Three syllables, soft in the middle.
"What does that mean?" Maya asked.
Liesel thought about it. "It is when you are happy, but the happy has sad inside it. Because the good thing is also ending. Like the last warm day."
"That's two feelings," Maya said.
"No," Liesel said. "It is one. We have one word."
Maya put the dish towel down.
"Say it again," she said.
Liesel said it again. Maya tried it. It came out lumpy.
"Grandmother, do you feel that one?"
Grandmother shrugged. "Of course. Everyone does."
"But there's no word for it in English."
"Then English people are slow," Grandmother said, and went back to the dishes.
But Maya stayed where she was, because something was not lining up, and she had a list in her head of things that did not line up, and this had just gone to the top.
"Liesel," she said. "When you feel it, does it feel like one thing or two things stuck together?"
Liesel was quiet on her end. The little square of her face on the screen looked up, the way people look up when they check something inside themselves.
"One thing," she said finally. "It is its own thing. It has its own shape."
"And I have to use two words. So when I feel it, do I feel two things and you feel one?"
"How would we ever know?" Liesel said, and laughed again, but Maya wasn't laughing.
Because here was the trouble. Maya had always thought a feeling was a feeling. That it arrived, fully made, like weather. Happy was happy everywhere. Scared was scared. You were born knowing them the way you were born knowing how to be cold.
But Liesel had a feeling Maya didn't have a name for. And Maya could only reach it by gluing two of her words together. And the glued version, she suspected, was not the same shape as Liesel's one smooth word.
"Grandmother," she said. "When you were little, in the old country, did you have a word for being nervous before a test?"
"There were no tests like yours," Grandmother said. "There was: did the goat get out. There was: is the bread going to rise."
"But the feeling. The jumpy stomach feeling."
Grandmother dried a glass. "We did not name our stomachs. The stomach did what it did."
"So you had the jumpy stomach but no word."
"I had a stomach," Grandmother said, a little annoyed now. "Everyone has a stomach."
Maya looked at the phone. "Liesel. Do this. Think of the word. The bridge one."
"It is not the bridge word, it is just a word, you asked it at the bridge."
"Fine. Think of it. Now. Where do you feel it?"
Liesel pressed her hand flat just under her collarbone. "Here. A little heavy. Like a coat."
"When I feel happy I feel it higher. In my face. My chest goes light, not heavy."
"Then yours floats and mine sinks," Liesel said. "Same name, different place."
"But it's not the same name," Maya said. "That's the whole thing. We don't even have the same names. You sorted your feelings into different boxes than I did. And the boxes change where it shows up in your body. Or the body changes the boxes. I don't know which way it goes."
The kitchen was very quiet except for water running.
Maya was thinking about how she had always trusted her feelings to be true things, solid things, the most solid things she owned. When she was furious, she knew she was furious the way she knew her own hands. But furious was a word. Somebody had handed it to her. Before she had the word, what was she? A hot stomach and a tight throat and a wish to slam a door. Her brain had taken all that and reached into a box of words her family gave her and pulled out furious and stuck it on.
And Liesel's brain, with a different box of words, might have pulled out something else. Might have built a feeling Maya could not even fully feel, because Maya had never been handed the box it came in.
"Liesel," Maya said slowly. "You didn't learn the word for a feeling you already had."
"What do you mean."
"I mean maybe you couldn't fully have the feeling until you had the word. Maybe the word is part of how the feeling gets built. Maybe your grandmother and my grandmother had the same jumpy stomach but turned it into two different feelings, because they reached into two different boxes."
"That is a strange thing to say," Liesel said.
"I know." Maya's own stomach was doing something now and she didn't have a clean word for it either. Happy that she'd seen it. A little scared because if feelings were built, then her most solid things were not solid. They were made. Somebody could hand her a new word tomorrow and she would have a new feeling by next year, one she couldn't have today.
"Say it one more time," Maya said. "The word. Slow."
Liesel said it slow, in three pieces.
Maya said it back. This time it came out less lumpy. Still not Liesel's. But closer. And as she said it she felt something arrive just under her collarbone, a little heavy, like a coat. Not happy. Not sad. Not the two of them glued. A third thing, with its own shape, sliding into a box that had not existed in her ten minutes ago.
"There," Liesel said, watching her face on the little screen. "You felt it. I saw it."
"Maya," Grandmother said, holding out a wet plate. "You are not drying. You are standing there making faces."
Maya took the plate. She turned it over in the towel, once, twice, and looked at her grandmother, and then she said the word out loud again, into the steam over the sink, trying to teach it to the kitchen.
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A science-verified short story for curious kids · Curiosity Land